Nigel Mustafa Memorial Quartet
In the interest of full disclosure, the subject of this week's column was bought and paid for last Christmas. A friend of the Nigel Mustafa Memorial Quartet purchased it through The Stranger's annual Strangercrombie charity auction, benefiting both hungry Seattle residents and a band, which, I guess, was hungry for press. My assignment was simply to experience NMMQ and write about what I witnessed.
Three months after the check cleared, I headed down to the Central to see what the paper's goodwill had brought my way (besides a club that offers 25-cent perfume dispensers in the ladies' room). For a good hour last Thursday, my date and I--along with two English guys getting called out by name, a half-dozen of the band's friends, and what must've been the next band because they kept checking the time on their cell phones--were entertained by the quartet. Allow me to make the introductions: There was frontman Father Victor Pickles of Sandwich (versed in the banjo and saxophone, as well as hyperactive frottage with inanimate objects lying around the stage), guitarist Ace S. Wylde, bassist Fok Chu-Mang, and drummer Hung Lo. Father Pickles, dressed as a priest with a gold four-finger NMMQ ring on his knuckles, behaved in a way befitting of a man of the cloth, focusing almost exclusively on what he could stick where, who he could feel up when, and, of course, Jesus. This meant a selection of songs that made American Pie seem as horny as a recently neutered house pet. There was the token rap--"for all the gangstas in the house"--about "feminist pedagogy" that required the audience to shout back "bitches 'n' hos," a song about "the anaconda mamba," one about chicks with dicks, another about naked boobies, the one called "See You Later, I'm a Gay," and, in a slight shift away from anatomy, a number about dating a retarded girl and the importance of politics (it was about Bush's "dick sucking days"). The music was like Blues Traveler meets They Might Be Giants meets ska/funk/rap rock meets Sugar Ray. They took riffs from Steve Miller and jammed them up against Van Halen and "Kumbaya," all the while with Father Pickles' crotch area jammed up against his microphone, his hand, stage pillars, and, at the end of the night, a mop he rode like a blowup doll during a finale about the Lord. It was kind of frat-boy freak rock, dedicated to Mustafa, an "English-Afghani tent-peg magnate" whose life, Pickles told me later, was cut short in a yak-neutering accident. If you'd like to see this self-proclaimed "avant-tard" display for yourself, NMMQ play the Lobo Saloon on Friday, March 19.
And more on this next one next week: KEXP is finally adding a punk show to its lineup. At the moment, they're narrowing down a list of highly qualified local personalities to decide who will host the program. Definitely a step in the right direction for the station, and one that can't happen soon enough.
